“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Selina growled, in stark contrast
to her usual bright greeting: Jason Blood, the man, the myth, the legend.

She stood in the front door, arms crossed, regarding her visitor with
marked disapproval.

“I trust I’m not too early,” Jason answered mildly as Selina stepped
aside to let him enter. “We did say 8:30, did we not, with Dr.
Leiverman coming at 9?”

“Yes,” Selina answered, pinching her shoulders back then stretching them
forward. “I’m sorry, Jason, I just had a really bad night, and now
there’s this big yellow ball of fire in the sky. Birds twittering out
there. Dewy grass smell. Mornings are Woof.”

Jason’s brow wrinkled.

“A bad night, you said. Nightmares?”

Selina glared at him, disgusted.

“No, Mr. Doom and Gloom, no nightmares, no four white horsemen, no
boiling seas. I just couldn’t get to sleep. He was out late and
it was Joker. I… I don’t sleep well, when it’s Joker. But let’s
keep that as our secret, okay; don’t tell him.”

Jason gave a wry smile, wondering for the hundredth time since that first
nightmare how Selina the Catwoman could be involved in a cosmic crisis.

Cats were the exception to every rule in the magical world, but
nevertheless. Selina was an ordinary woman who wore a catsuit,
nothing more. She was also a rarity in Jason’s travels in that her
behavior towards him never changed when she learned about Etrigan. She
was a good friend, a talented thief, and she had a delightful smile.
How in the name of Merlin’s beard could such a woman be the heart of an
impending apocalypse?

Jason kept his thoughts to himself. Instead he asked, “Do you have
any idea why Bruce is so insistent I be a part of this exercise?”

“Well, I don’t know for certain, but I can guess,” Selina answered, a
spark of her usual playfulness emerging. “You’re our connection,
Jason, magically speaking. Where else are we going to go for a dime
bag of mystic hoodoo?”

Jason grimaced and followed her to the morning room.

“I do wish I knew if you were joking,” he noted under his breath.

∞ Wayne Manor, Mundus Alius Nail

Whiskers and Watson trotted into the Chinese room and hopped into
Selina’s lap, creating a nudging, mewling, wet-nosed fur-barrier between her
and the email she was trying to answer. That much wasn’t unusual, both
cats were adjusting to her move into the manor… Truth be told, they
were adjusting a lot better than Selina herself. The whole thing had
been so sudden. One day they were adversaries, the next lovers, and
what seemed like only a heartbeat later: Mr & Mrs… It was… well… a lot
for kitty to adjust to.

There had always been an attraction, sure. And after Joker, after
that awful night, they’d turned to each other. But even so, he was
Batman. All those years: wanting him, fighting him, baiting him,
dreaming about what it might be like together; he was Batman. Now she
was Mrs. Bruce Wayne, and she didn’t really know who Bruce Wayne was.
It had all been so sudden and so intense. Now that things were
settling down to “normal,” it was hard to know how to be. She knew how
to taunt Batman, she knew how to support that man inside the mask when he
was hurting and grieving… But now, now was… something else entirely, a
completely different life, a completely different world. How could she
be expected to just accept all that and trot right into this plane of
existence, “Mrs. Bruce Wayne,” like it was nothing at all? Like it
was…

WOOF! It would be a lot easier to make sense of her own
confusion if Whiskers and Watson hadn’t settled into the new arrangement
like they’d been raised in the same litter. Whiskers reveled in the
extra attention he was getting since the move, and Watson seemed excited by
the additional company, human and feline. A sudden lapful of playful
cat wasn’t unusual, but what made this occurrence special was the fact that
both cats wore new collars—blue collars. Selina touched the thick
matte fabric gathered neatly around Watson’s neck and growled.

∞ ∞ ∞

∞ Wayne Manor, Here and Now

Over the next 10 minutes, Selina told Jason what little she knew about
Bruce’s other guest, Dr. Lionel Leiverman, doing some sort of mysterious
research for the Wayne Foundation. Jason tried his best to follow, but
Selina’s cats had appeared and were making the task all but impossible.
The first time he had met Whiskers and Nutmeg, they sensed Etrigan and
reacted with panic and dread. He spoke to them in Mau-im-dwo, the
ancient tongue used by the priests of Bast to speak with divine and mortal
cats. He explained about Etrigan, and ever since, they were so
intrigued with his ability to talk to them, they hovered around his chair
whenever they saw him, rubbing his legs, butting their heads against his
palms, purring to wake the dead, and sometimes even leaping into his lap.

“Eh, yes, Bruce’s years of travel,” Jason managed (while Nutmeg
complimented his shirt). Something about the years of travel, Selina
was saying… Bruce meeting this Dr. Leiverman at Oxford, or maybe it
was Princeton, while he was traveling the world preparing for the mission…
Leiverman doing some kind of theoretical work, physics or metaphysics, that
didn’t interest Bruce at the time since it was of no use to The Mission
(Bruce and that mission, Jason had known astraroth daemons with less
single-minded focus)… At that time, of course, years before beginning
his work as Batman, Bruce had never seen or experienced magic…

Here Selina was interrupted (had she but known it) by Whiskers’s opinion
of Bruce’s opinion of magic. Whiskers subscribed the basic Feline
Canon and thought Bruce would benefit from its insights: Am I afraid of
it? If so, run. If not, can I eat it? If so, eat. If
not, can I play with it? If so, play. If not, sleep until #1, 2,
or 3 occur.

…but now that Bruce knew about magic, Selina was saying—not only knew
about it, but had a serious grudge against it—he’d started funding this Dr.
Leiverman’s research, only moderately in the past, but aggressively since
the Zatanna mindwipe came out…

∞ Wayne Manor, Mundus Alius Nail

Selina squinted again at the new collars on Whiskers’ and Watson’s necks,
searching her memory to confirm this really was the color her instincts told
her it was: Batcape-Blue.

Why in all the years she had battled Batman had she not realized what a
willfully stubborn prick he could be? Sure, he was rigidly inflexible
on law and order issues, but he was a crimefighter. Burglary was one
thing, her costume was something else entirely.

She’d gone out as “Batwoman” once—one time in that garish red and
yellow affair—because it didn’t seem prudent to go charging into battle
alongside Batman and the remnants of the Justice League dressed as an
escaped catburglar. The League had enough public relations problems
from the anti-meta campaigns at that point, not to mention none of them had
any idea what they were going up against. So appearing as Catwoman
didn’t seem like a good idea, and she’d made use of the costume that was
available—although she drew the line at carrying a purse. A
crimefighter with a purse, she had to wonder what possessed that Kane
woman.

Anyway, they got through it. They made their stand. They defeated
the great threat—which turned out to be a Human-Kryptonian gene graft gone
wrong called Olsen. Batman was cleared of all charges for killing
Joker, and they’d started putting their lives back together. Now that
they’d found each other, Selina was more than willing to join Batman in his
crusade. She really didn’t consider herself a crimefighter, but he
needed some way to fill the void left by Robin and Batgirl. So she
would be his partner, and she would fight crime with him in Gotham, and she
would move into his house and wear his ring and take his name. But she
would not run around Gotham City in a yellow leotard with a red cape
carrying a purse and calling herself Batwoman. A new costume was
absolutely essential, and of course she wanted purple. Purple was her
style, the color of royalty for the queen of the Gotham night, and a clear
connection to all she had ever been as Catwoman.

She wanted purple, but he’d been campaigning for a Batwoman costume to
mirror his own look, blue and gray, ever since she mentioned redoing the
outfit. It started playfully enough: “How about blue” and a boyish
wink. She had smiled at first—in surprise more than anything.
She wasn’t used to Batman being Bruce Wayne, she wasn’t used to that face,
to the dark aloof crimefighter having a devastatingly handsome face.
She’d always found Batman sexy, but she wasn’t prepared for Bruce’s…
charm. The first volleys were so subtle and coy. But now he
was becoming more insistent, and the Bat’s willful stubbornness was emerging
from behind Bruce’s easygoing charm. And that she could deal with.
She might not know yet how to deal with Bruce Wayne, but Batman she’d
battled long enough that she was not about to let him win.

∞ ∞ ∞

∞ Wayne Manor, Mundus Alius 2

There was a loud clap of thunder, and Bruce and Selina glanced at each
other for a quarter beat, waiting…

Nothing happened. They both relaxed.

And then the quiet patter of the rain was shattered by the piercing wail
of a crying infant.

“I’ll go,” Selina sighed, resigned to yet another walk up the stairs.
She had known—they had both known—that becoming parents would bring new and
interesting challenges, but neither had understood how little the late
nights on rooftops prepare you for three o’clock feedings or thunderstorm
coddling.

“No, no, I like going,” Bruce insisted, leaning over and kissing her
quickly on the forehead.

“But you just got back from—” she blurted, but he was already gone in one
of those miraculous bat-vanishes. “—patrol,” she said, stubbornly
finishing the sentence anyway. Then she chuckled to herself.
“Can’t pass up a chance to save the damsel in distress, can you, Stud?”

Reaching the nursery, Bruce had a similar thought. He did like
taking care of his daughter. He liked reassuring her. He liked,
for once, being able to step through the door knowing he could really solve
whatever had gone wrong on the other side. The cries that sounded so
alarming could be quieted with something as simple as a warm bottle, a fresh
diaper, or a plush cat called Muffindrop.

He glanced down into the crib in awed wonder at how he’d ever come to be
standing there. He and Selina—Catwoman, of all people—married.
He’d always taken pride in his “mission”—in the work that he did saving his
city, and even the world from time to time. For years, he thought that
was the only contentment he would find in his life. But he was wrong.
He knew now that true joy came not from the work he did but from the love
he’d finally found. He loved Selina, and now that love had blessed
them both with this amazing miniature person, a living embodiment of their
love and their life together. He’d worried that Selina’s pregnancy
would temper his work, that the mission would suffer because of his family
obligations. But the first time he picked up his newborn daughter, he
knew the opposite was true. The birth of his child had strengthened his
resolve in ways he never could have imagined, because he was no longer
saving the city for the sake of the millions of innocents out there; he was
saving the city for his little girl…

“Hey sweetie,” he said softly, patting his daughter’s hair.
“Nothing to be frightened of, Helena, it’s just a thunder storm.”

“DaBa” she answered.

He smiled at the non-riddling nonsense.

“You said it, Kitten. Want to come downstairs?”

“Poohbamee,” she answered.

Bruce smiled even broader and picked her up. She had her mother’s
eyes, and he was even more helpless faced with the junior version than the
originals.

∞ ∞ ∞

∞ Wayne Manor, Here and Now

Jason’s first challenge of the day was helping Selina entertain Dr.
Leiverman while they all waited for Bruce. Having traveled the world
over the course of centuries acting as courtier and diplomat, rascal and
rake, Jason Blood had never met a man like Lionel Leiverman. The man
seemed to have no social skills at all. He could talk only about his
work. And while Jason had known many obsessed workaholics long before
those terms came into being, none of them had been theoretical physicists.

“Alternate dimensions!” Leiverman said excitedly. He was talking to
Selina and he was blind to what anyone with working eyes should have been
able to see: that here was a woman who hadn’t slept the night before.
However intelligent Selina Kyle might otherwise be, she could hold no
thought at this moment beyond the taste of her coffee. And this man
was throwing alternate dimensions at her.

“The alternate dimension, or parallel universe if you prefer,” Leiverman
went on, oblivious to his listener’s plight, “is not this science fiction
story where the Justice League is evil and hearts are located on the right
side of the body. The alternate universe is a function of subatomic
random possibilities; an electron orbits the nucleus at 30-degrees instead
of 35 and poof—alternate reality. All probabilitiescontained
in this universe or that one; that is the sublime beauty of quantum
infinity. The critical mass for a new reality is not the large object,
like a man making a conscious decision to go right instead of left at a fork
in the road, but a random dice game that is played among the infinitesimally
small.”

Selina stifled a yawn and managed a polite nod.

“So not a separate universe where Lex Luthor has hair,” she said, to show
she was listening.

“No,” Bruce answered, entering briskly and shaking Dr. Leiverman’s hand.
“So sorry, I got tied up with all kinds of things this morning,” he
explained. Then he turned to Selina and completed the thought. “Chromosomes
are too big, so active hair follicles on the former president aren’t a
candidate for a separate universe, right Doc?”

“Actually they are,” Leiverman answered happily, delighted to have an
informed student to enlighten. “A Dr. Lee Havnok did a paper on this
only last year. We called it the ‘Stalin’s moustache’ theorem: At the
chromosomal level, yes, you are right, it is much too big to generate
a quantum universe. But the chromosomes result from the random
occurrence when one particular sperm out of millions fertilizes the egg, and
this can easily be altered by the chance variations in subatomic orbits.”

Watson was curled on the chair opposite Selina, watching her curiously.
“You should be on my side, pal,” she told the cat. “A little feline
solidarity, it’s not that much to ask.”

In the manner of cats, Watson responded to this criticism by shutting his
eyes and resuming his nap.

“No, no,” she told him. “I know that trick. Look at this,
just have a look and tell me if you approve?” She held up the pencil
sketch that had fallen from her book, having been substituted overnight for
her regular bookmark. “Look at those ears, that’s a bat-cowl.
Look at those ears, your ears are much better aren’t they?”

Watson purred—for no cat would argue about the superiority of his
appearance—but he declined to open his eyes. Selina rolled the sketch
into a ball and threw it at him.

∞ ∞ ∞

∞ Wayne Manor, Mundus Alius 19

Dickie Grayson hung out in the hippest little hideaway in the Northern
Hemisphere (the legendary Batcave, underneath Stately Wayne Manor, dontcha
know!) twirling the small plastic card between his fingers. What a drag; 16
years of age and he’d just scored the mother lode of liberating
documentation—his very own driver’s license. He should have been out crusin’
the streets of ol’ G.C. in the trippiest of transports: the Batmobile! But
no, old man Wayne had put the kibosh on that plan; he’d just informed Dick
that—perfect score on the driving test or not—Dick was gonna be required to
take some 9-week super-special vehicular training before he’d be allowed to
feel behind the wheel of the old ’Mobile.

Man, what happened to his old pal Bruce? Back in the early days, it
was just the two of them; the Dynamic Duo! They’d fight for truth and
justice, put a hurting on the baddies, buck the establishment, then boogie
’til dawn! But now? Now Bruce was becoming the establishment! It was
like at 12:01 in the AM on the day of Bruce’s 30th, everything
took a turn for the worse. Maybe he’d been right all along—everyone over
thirty was worthless!

Nah, it wasn’t the age thing, Dickie knew. It was her.

Alright, check this: there was no denying that Catwoman was one grade-A,
prime-cut female. One peep at the “evening wear” and it was obvious the girl
was righteously hot-to-trot. There wasn’t a single, red-blooded male in all
of the Americas that could spot that magnificent bod, wrapped in the
tightest of purple threads, and ignore the obvious stirrings—and ol’ Bruce
seemed to have it worst of all. Dick couldn’t blame him there; hell, even
he’d had a fantasy or twenty about a sweaty encounter with the
Purloining Pussycat. But that’s all it ever should have been! A one-time
(okay, probably more like four- or five-time) encounter, a quick
wham-bam-Thank-you-ma’am and then back to the business of saving the world
for ALL the groovy chicks out there.

But then, the old man gets it in his head that she’s “more than that” and
suddenly they’re thrown back into this Leave It To Beaver nightmare where
Bat and Cat (scratch that: Bruce and “Selina”) are upstairs yakking
about china patterns and engraved invitations, and good ol’ Dickie’s left
down in the ’Cave dreading a future where Robin the Boy Wonder has to wait
outside the bathroom for “Mistress Catty” to finish washing her hair!

And Barbara—the only chick in this whole scene that’s supposed to be part
of the in-crowd—is absolutely useless in the “pointing out the obvious
cat-astrophe” department. One look at the glittery finger weight and she
starts “ooh-ing” and “aah-ing” like a third-grader seeing her first puppy.
Not that Dickie was at all surprised by that turn of events—Babs
always was the nattering-nincompoop of the Gotham Nighttime Scene. But even
good old stoic Alfie’s gone all blubbery happiness over the upcoming
nuptials…

Does no one else catch the hitch here? Hello! She’s Catwoman! (Holy
Horrendous Hoodwinks, Batman!) She’s one of the Bad Eggs! And now Batman’s
letting the Felonious Feline into his house, into his life, into his bed,
and into the ’Cave, but he’s nixing Dickie’s chance at a turn behind
the wheel? It was Bizarro-world, Gotham Style! What was next: trading in the
Batmobile for a Studebaker and turning the disco-room into a baby-shack?

Dick thought, and not for the first time, that maybe it was time to blow
this pop stand and groove on to greener pastures; seek his own fabulous fame
and fortune as a solo act. He certainly couldn’t fathom wasting any more of
his time living in Kyle-Wayne Manor with Papa, the Missus and any broodlings
that were sure to follow.

This was definitely the worst thing to hit the Gotham crimefighting scene
since Batgirl first puttered up on her little motor-scooter and giggled “Hey
there!”

∞ ∞ ∞

∞ Wayne Manor, Here and Now

Jason Blood was aghast at what he was hearing:

All matter and energy made up these vibrating filaments called Strings;
fine.

The way they vibrated determined what it was they made up; sure why
not.

The way they vibrated determined what cosmic laws applied—and then
something about gravity and electromagnetism that Jason didn’t quite follow
but Bruce seemed terribly excited about. And then, THEN this
outlandish suggestion that magick might be nothing more than a way of
temporarily altering the Strings’ movement so that different cosmic
laws applied?

“It frames the so-called ‘supernatural’ in science…” Leiverman was
saying.

Jason looked at Bruce and could sense what the premise really meant to
him: …And gets this grossly unacceptable thing called ‘magic’ into a
realm where it could be dealt with.

“You think you can control the magickal forces?” he asked, white
astonishment blotting out the usual sarcasm in his voice.

“No,” Bruce said simply, “I think it’s already controlled. You all
are. You’re operating in exactly the same universe as the rest of us;
you just don’t know it yet. The same rules—the same laws—apply.
You’re different only in that, through magic, you’ve figured out how to
change venue, but there are still laws in place, judges and punishments
if they’re broken. That’s why there’s always a price.”

He got up and left the room, Nutmeg trotted after him and Whiskers after
her. Selina looked to Bruce, winked, and joined the procession.
“Be right back,” she said lightly from the doorway, but as she turned into
the hall, her polite hostess smile melted into a concerned frown.

“Jason, I hope you’re not offended. He doesn’t mean to be rude, you
know. It’s… well, I’m just hearing all this for the first time, but
the idea, even the remotest possibility that magic isn’t something outside
of scientific thought and analysis, it has to be manna from heaven for him.
Are you very angry, Jason?”

“I’m not angry, Selina. I am not offended or threatened by the
possibilities suggested by this ‘theory.’ I am… in awe.
Selina, I have kept silent about many things since the account of Bruce’s
mindwipe became known, but the fact is, magician though I am, I sympathize
more than either of you know. I respect Bruce and I am fond of you
personally, Selina. But that is not why I… empathize as I do.
The truth is that it’s happened to me, countless times. Twenty minutes
Zatanna took from him, good lord, there are entire months in my past
I can’t account for. And false memories, I know Etrigan has crafted
some, but I’ve no way of knowing which they are, nor is there anything I
could do about it if I did.”

“My god, Jason, I had no idea,” Selina whispered.

“How could you? How could anyone know what it is to have your soul
knitted to a demon of hell?”

“This must all strike you as a… a very selfish and self-important
overreaction then.”

“No,” Jason said, a forceful compassion creeping into his voice. “I
admire Bruce a great deal; I always have. And I abhor the way Zatanna
has abused her powers. I’ve also been worrying about it since the day
we watched him take his ‘revenge,’ for lack of a better word.”

“Jason, all he did was have Martian Manhunter freeze her telepathically
for an hour, ‘taking’ an hour of her life in return for the 20 minutes she
took from him.”

“Oh it’s not that, I’ve no complaint with his action. There was an
elegance in what he did, truly poetic justice. No, it was something he
said to her that day that sparked my concern: the rule of three, use
magicks to perform any negative action upon another and it will be revisited
upon you threefold.

“Selina, the act of a Martian telepath and a human man don’t count,
karmically speaking. Zatanna still has an accounting to make
for Bruce, and for Dr. Light, and what she did to that Top fellow in
Keystone City… for any abuse of her powers. For any… Who knows?
We can’t know everything that she’s done—even she likely doesn’t know,
magically speaking, exactly what it is she has done.

“Don’t you see, all Zatanna does is talk backwards. Selina, however
else he may be biased, Bruce is completely correct about one thing: with
magick there is always a price. All magic-users must work to
cultivate their power, there is cost and payment, balance and
counterbalance, always, even to…” He paused, smiled, and snapped his
fingers, and a tiny white flame appeared at his fingertips. “…Very
useful if you forgot your flashlight in the car.”

Selina smiled, and he went on, his tone becoming serious again.

“In the very crafting of a spell, you must grapple with the forces you
are using and how you put them to use. And if you’ve tested the
limits, crossed some line, you know instantly. It’s like hoisting a
heavy weight with your back instead of your legs… You won’t get far
before your body tells you you’re making an error.

“And all Zatanna does is talk backwards. It’s like… oh, how to
explain this. It’s like quoting a poem compared to writing one.
Speak the result you desire without any thought to… For years, Zatanna has
channeled the magickal forces this way without any conscious thought of what
forces she manipulates in which way—a naïve college student racking up
thousands of dollars in credit card debt because it’s so easy to get them
and use them. And never quite realizing the true costs being
incurred.”

“My heart bleeds,” Selina said coldly.

“I wouldn’t expect you to be sympathetic,” Jason said mildly. “But
I worry none the less.”

∞ Wayne Manor, Mundus Alius 116

Catwoman pretended to be asleep throughout the scene in the cave…
“I thought we could talk this out,” Flash was saying. “You
thought wrong,” Batman answered, picking her up. She remained
still, limp in his arms, through “Please, Bruce, they were just trying to
protect Sue,” “Well, now they need to protect themselves,” and
“If the Secret Society remembers what you did to them, they probably
remember why you did it.” She remained still and limp as he turned
his back on the Justice League and carried her up the stairs… Still until
she heard the click of the clock passage closing behind them. Then she
leaned her head against his chest and hugged him lightly.

“Go back to sleep,” he said with a soft grunt.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” she said. “I heard the whole thing. Bruce,
what in god’s name is going on with you and the League?”

“You don’t want to know,” he graveled.

“Maybe not,” she whispered as he carried her up the steeper staircase to
the manor bedrooms. “But I know you shouldn’t be alone tonight.”
She eyed him seductively, her fingers tracing the symbol on his chest. She
stared directly into his eyes, seduction mixing with promise and a hint of
vulnerability. Breathlessly, she uttered, “Stay with me.”

At the top of the stairs he froze, eyes glancing back and forth between
the hallway to the guest suite and his own bedroom door. He hesitated
between the two directions and glanced down at her cradled in his arms.

“You’re hurt,” he murmured. “You lost a lot of blood.”

“Not that much.” She teased, but even the playful banter was
different. It was like that first kiss on the rooftops—the realization that
maybe there could be more, that they could make it work. He wanted
to—god, how he wanted to—but there were so many questions, so many barriers…

“Just stay with me for a while. We both need a warm touch more than
rest right now.” There was such a yearning, almost pleading look in
those deep green eyes that he found himself getting lost. He was back on
that rooftop, her body pressed hard against his own, lips and tongues
entwined.

His lip twitched briefly, and he turned right into his own bedroom.

∞ ∞ ∞

∞ Wayne Manor, Here and Now

When Jason returned to the study, Dr. Leiverman had set up a line of
ritual candles of different colors. Behind each was a hinged trio of
mirrors, and before each was a strange gold cylinder with a number of gears
and lenses protruding from it.

“Fascinating,” Bruce was saying, looking through one of the lenses.
“Jason, what’s yellow represent for you people?”

Jason was surprised by the abruptness of the question, but he answered
it.

“If by ‘you people’ you mean Englishmen, yellow jerseys indicate that the
Watford Football League is playing a home game,” Jason said dryly.
“But if you mean mystics, there are many systems linking colours with
specific magical energies. In the Malbrough tradition, yellow is tied to
attraction and persuasion. According to Cunningham & Harrington,
yellow is the intellect, eloquence, and the power of thought—”

“Why?” Bruce interrupted.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Why? Why does yellow equal persuasion or thought? You guys
go to all this trouble to figure out what colors are ‘linked’ to ‘specific
magical energies,’ but you don’t find out why? What’s the connection?
You don’t come up with any underlying principles of why anything works?”

“I, eh-,” Jason stammered. “Why it works is… is the essence
of the magickal force.”

“Jason, yellow light is made of the same stuff as red light. You
know the reason it’s yellow? The wavelength is about 570 nm. When that
increases to around 590, it looks orange, if it keeps going to 650, it’s
red. So what’s the connection, what is it about a 570 nm wavelength
that helps you screw with somebody’s head?”

“Bruce, I really don’t—”

“The flames on all of these candles are yellow, by the way,
because there’s sodium in the wick and in the wax. The color of a
flame depends on the material being burned. Each atom or molecule has
certain special frequencies (that means colors) at which it absorbs
and emits light, just like a musical instrument has special frequencies at
which it absorbs and emits sound. See what I’m saying?”

“I cannot imagine what you are saying,” Jason said sourly.

“Sodium atoms glow yellow very brightly when they’re heated; yellow light
is their favorite color to emit. This particular shade of yellow is
called the ‘sodium D line’ because of the electron orbits involved in the
sodium atoms before and after the light is emitted.”

“Fascinating, I’m sure. But Bruce, this has nothing to do with
magick.”

“How do you know? Jason, none of you have ever bothered to find
out! Your version of science seems to spend all this time working out
what yellow does, but you don’t even know what ‘yellow’ is.”

“It’s the same with the herbs and the minerals, as well,” Leiverman
added. “The mystics’ version of science resembles our ‘categorical’
disciplines: classifying phylum and species, indexing the properties of each
with great precision. But practically nothing of what we would
consider inquisitive study, no research into the greater mechanisms.”

“Dr. Leiverman, would you excuse us for a moment, I’d like a word with
Bruce in private.”

Bruce grunted, Leiverman left, and Jason Blood placed his palm over one
of the lit candles, causing the flame to rise instantly and dance around his
hand.

“May I remind you, Bruce, that there is a demon of Hell caged inside my
soul? I don’t have to investigate why my magicks work, I know
why they work. They’re Evil. Good and Evil are very real forces
in the universe, Bruce. The evil, at least, I feel on a daily basis.
Ask Selina if you don’t want to take my word for it. She felt
Etrigan’s malice when we joined hands for the seeing.”

“I don’t doubt what you feel, Jason. I just don’t know that it
means what you think it means, what all magic-users think it means. Go
outside and stand in the sunlight, it feels warm. That’s very welcome
if it’s 17 degrees and you’ve been tramping through the snow; the warmth
feels wonderful. Go to Florida in August, it’s a different story; that
same sunlight is not your friend. How it feels is subjective, Jason,
but it’s all solar radiation; it’s all light produced by the fusion of
hydrogen and helium in the core of a yellow star 93 million miles away.
It all gets here at the speed of light, 186,282.4 miles-per-second, because
that is the universal speed limit that nothing gets to break.”

Jason cleared his throat.

“What do you hope to accomplish by this, Bruce?”

“Something is broken, isn’t it? Something large and powerful and
destructive is raging out of control, probably because one of you let a
genii out of the bottle without knowing what you were dealing with.”

“And how is citing the speed of light going to—”

“’I was born fourteen hundred years ago,’” Bruce quoted, “’I’ve channeled
forces that could open a pentagram in your blood but even I don’t know
what’s coming.’ Jason, you came to me with this.
What did you think I was going to do?”

“I came because I was concerned about Selina and she happens to live in
your house. It was not a ‘consulting detective’ scenario, Bruce.
I was not bringing ‘a case’ to Batman’s attention.”

“Well, you’ve got my attention anyway. You, Etrigan, and Ra’s all
show up in my house in the span of a few days, all screaming ‘Crisis’ and
pointing at Selina. Like it or not, you’ve got my attention.”

“Bruce, I—”

“Of course, you’re the only one of those three who found it necessary to
put a magic ring on her finger.”

“I did what I felt was necessary.”

“And now I’m doing what I think is necessary. Are you going to help or
not?”

“That depends. Is my help to consist of more than listening to
dubious theories about magick and strings?”

“You know it is.”

“Then I am at your disposal.”

Bruce grunted.

“Shall we call the others back in then?”

Bruce said nothing at first; he was looking down at a burning candle.

“Jason,” he asked softly. “In the magic realm, what does purple mean?”

“Purple is power. Purple intensifies power, it denotes the magickal
force made manifest. In short, purple is magick itself.”

“I see.”

∞ Wayne Manor, Mundus Alius Nail

Whiskers and Watson wrestled playfully on the floor, and Selina was
pleased to see the two cats getting along so well. She had replaced
their blue collars with purple ones and made her own sketch for a cowl with
a proper set of cat-ears. She had yet to find a good place to leave it
where Bruce was sure to see.

She’d tried approaching him directly and that got her nowhere.
“Hey, it’s your costume. Design it however you want.” A totally
unconcerned brushoff—but the hints kept coming. So she’d tried
answering in kind, sneaky hint for sneaky hint. But her first attempts
had all misfired. She didn’t know the routine of the house yet, and
Alfred kept finding her sketches folded into Bruce’s washcloth in the master
bath or rolled in his coffee mug in the cave. He would return them to
her with a quiet cough and a polite “I believe this must be yours, Madame.”

It was an unfair advantage. It was his house, and his butler, and
his cave. She was outmatched every way she turned, but she simply
could not let him dictate something so personal and basic. Her costume
expressed who she was and if she gave in on this first clash, what would
that mean for their life together?

And as for Alfred, he might have been Bruce’s butler much longer than
he’d been hers, but she was lady of the house now, and he’d better
learn whose side to take on domestic issues. This was all about her
new life with Bruce and her new home. And it didn’t get much closer to
home for Selina than what she wore as Catwoman!

She sneezed, as if allergic to the very idea of Batman dictating
her nighttime persona, and reached for a Kleenex. Instead of the
supple tissue she expected, her fingers felt fabric. She turned and a blue
fabric swatch was protruding from the box.

It occurred to Selina that, in addition to being purple, her new costume
must also have claws.

∞ ∞ ∞

∞ Wayne Manor, Here and Now

There was a wave of warm dizziness and Selina moved to steady herself
against the wall outside the study until it passed. She was surprised
by the sudden support that materialized under her elbow.

“Hey, you alright?” Bruce was asking, and gentle fingers touched the side
of her face.

“Fine,” she assured him sincerely. “Little gravity shift. No sleep
plus no breakfast.”

“We’ll get you something to eat before we proceed, then. Jason’s
gone to his apartment to get supplies. We’ve got an hour, easy.”

“Supplies for what?” Selina asked, raising an eyebrow.

Bruce said nothing, but his eyes darkened and Selina felt the
unmistakable tingle of Batman’s presence.

“No, you can’t be serious. Magic hoodoo in your house?”

He looked off to the side, remembering a phrase of hers from countless
vaults and rooftops. “Those rubies don’t belong to you…”

“Technically,” he graveled.

“I have a very bad feeling about thi—,” she started to say, when she was
cut off by a slow, tender kiss. “mm, never mind,” she mumbled.

“You know I love you,” he whispered—the voice too soft to make a
Bat-or-Bruce determination, but he was still projecting that Bat-aura that
Selina did not associate with loving assurances. “I’ve always loved
you,” he added—this time in an undeniable Bat-gravel.

“I’m going to cut you off right there,” she interrupted. “Because
the next phrase after that is going to be something like ‘no matter what
happens,’ and I don’t do those; they’re bad luck. If we’re going
to go dancing on a hellmouth this afternoon, ‘Know I always loved you’ is
not the way to go right now. ‘You’re a jackass that can’t be trusted
to make a tuna sandwich’ is the note to end on.”

“You’re an impossible woman,” Bruce noted.

“That’s better.”

“No, it’s not. It’s frustrating as hell. Selina, I wasn’t
going to say ‘no matter what happens’ or anything like it. I
just… I wanted to ask you to take off that ring.”

“The moonstone? From Jason?”

He nodded.

“Yes. I can’t stand your wearing it. It’s… It’s magic
and it’s on your finger, I really can’t stomach it. Please take it off
and put this on instead.”

She looked down and saw a familiar glint of pink sapphire.

“That’s the ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever want to be married’ ring from the
MoMA opening,” she observed with an amused smile.

Bruce did not look amused. Instead, he touched his tongue to the
inside of his lips, opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, took a
breath, and glared.

“If that’s what it’s going to take to get that moonstone off your
finger—” he managed, his stomach clenching in violent, lurching twists.
He took another labored breath, when Selina shook her head.

“No, that’s not what I was saying,” she said hastily, concern swallowing
the amusement. “Bruce, I was not asking you to… Look, if it means that
much to you, of course I’ll take it off.”

She removed the ring silently and placed it in the center of his palm,
closing his fingers around it, then leaving her hand over his.

“I’ve always loved you, too,” she whispered before quickly adding “But
you’re a jackass who can’t make a tuna sandwich unsupervised, and I need
lunch.”

“Wait. No!” he growled, grabbing her wrists forcefully as she
turned to go.

“Have I ever mentioned how much I hate that,” Selina hissed.

He said nothing for a long moment but his grip tightened.

“You didn’t take the ring, the sapphire,” he said then, releasing his
hold and sounding embarrassed.

She held out her left hand, palm up, in an impatient ‘hand it over’
gesture. Rather than place the ring in it as she had done, Bruce
turned her hand gently, caressing the red marks his fingers had left on her
wrist.

“I’m sorry about that,” he murmured. Then he slid the ring smoothly
onto her finger, turned, and left.

∞ Wayne Manor, Mundus Alius Nail

Selina found the hot shower wonderfully relaxing. She’d explained the
costume frustrations to ReflectionTwit and then repeated it to the
ShowerScrubbie, and that too had been wonderfully relaxing. Having vented
while pulses of warm water soothed the tension from her neck and shoulders, she
began to see the humor of the situation. It was rather endearing, really.
He was so stubborn. It was so Batman, it just had nothing to do
with taking jewels from Cartier. You had to love him for it. By the
time those warm pulses of water massaged the shampoo from her hair, Selina was
considering a compromise. Purple could look very sharp in contrast with
that deep blue of his, a purple catsuit and a blue batcape maybe…

She turned off the showerhead, shook the excess water from her hair, slid
open the glass shower doors and reached for a towel. Her hand felt
only air where there should have been a stack of thick folded bathtowels.
She wiped wet film from her eyes with the back of her hand and peered at the
table where Alfred always left the towels—they were gone. She reached
for the hook where a terry robe always hung—and there, suspended on a
hanger, was the only fabric in the room in which she could wrap
herself—there on the hook was a dark blue batcape.

∞ ∞ ∞

∞ Wayne Manor, Here and Now

Jason didn’t like the idea of staging another seeing ritual with
Selina so Dr. Leiverman could test and quantify magical reverberations on
the physical plane. But he didn’t like the idea of oblivion either,
even if it would take Etrigan off his hands. All existence winking
into nothingness versus humoring one of Bruce’s wild theories, it was no
contest. Jason had known countless “Men of Science” over the decades,
and most of their ideas had been preposterous. Just look at
electricity: they harness a new energy and think it will cure everything
from tuberculosis to gout. Still, every now and then, one of those men
of science came up with something truly extraordinary—and on each and every
occasion they were ridiculed. At best, they were ridiculed.
Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Galileo. Sometimes they were persecuted,
sometimes executed, all because their ideas threatened a small mind’s view
of how the world really worked.

Jason had seen it play out enough times that he could put his own doubts
aside for one day and let Bruce conduct his experiment. He answered
every question politely and fully: the bowl he brought was chased silver
lined with mother of pearl, a sacred vessel salvaged from the siege of
Antioch by the warrior mages of Cilicia. The liquid was water of
Avalon, obtained from that enchanted isle by Lyle, the present seer, in
payment for the return of an important relic called the leabhar seun,
which she had foolishly lost to him. The bottle? Cobalt blue
with a silver cap, carved with Celtic knots; that he picked up on Ebay for
$14.95.

When these preliminaries were completed: a small table set up for the
ritual with two chairs, one for him and one for Selina to sit opposite each
other around the bowl, and Lionel Leiverman’s incomprehensible circle of
lenses and sensors positioned around them like a mystic circle from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jason took his place at the table and
nodded curtly for Selina to do the same.

She glanced at Bruce as if she expected never to see him again, touched a
finger to her lip and then flicked it outward. Jason took this to be a
none-too-furtive attempt to blow a kiss, and he occupied himself with a
smudge on the table rather than deigning to see Bruce’s response. When
at last Selina took her seat, Jason held out his hands, palms up.

“Ready to begin?” he asked kindly.

She nodded and placed her hands down on his, palm to palm.

Jason noticed her right hand no longer bore the moonstone ring, and her
left now wore a large pink gem—a gem which, to Jason’s eye, advertised its
cost and the wealth of the donor. Jason turned slowly to Bruce,
remembering that, angry as the man had been about the sage and the witch
orb, it was the discovery of that ring which brought about the violent
outburst. Now Bruce merely glared, not with the hell-month hatred
Jason had seen that day, but with a lifeless, isolated, emptiness. He
began to wonder if—

“AEIEE”

—when the thought was cut short by a scream.

Puking Light and Mortal CatWhat foulness, reeking thing is that?

Selina had pulled her hands away and sat there, chest rising and falling
as she labored for breath. She looked dazed and deathly pale.

“What is it?” Bruce yelled.

Selina ignored him and looked to Jason, her eyes dull with a dead horror.

“What the hell was that?” she asked.

Hell is Home, you Feline Tart!Speak not of Hell, we have no
partIn making of… whate’er that be.That thing is… vile. Like
your espirit.

“Selina, what happened,” Bruce was saying, “What did you see?”

“I’m going to throw up,” she answered, running from the room.

“Jason, somebody tell me, what happened? What did she see?”

“I don’t know. I saw nothing, but Etrigan… seems to find it
quite disgusting, whatever it was. He’s absolutely retching; I’ve
never heard him like this. Usually if it disgusts Etrigan, it’s a
positive force: joy, hope, faith…”

“I don’t see Joy, Hope, or Faith making Selina throw up, do you?”

“BRUCE?!” Selina called loudly from some distant part of the
house. The urgency of her call yanked them all from their chairs
instantly.

Bruce motioned for Jason and Leiverman to stay and bolted out of the
study, heading toward the dining room. He heard the voice from far
down the hallway, a voice twisted with rage and fear—

“YOU are not the Batman! I am the Batman!
Now Get Out!”

—and ran faster, the haunting familiarity of that voice slamming into his
brain like a spike. It wasn’t just the voice, but the words themselves
that tore at his memory. He’d heard all of this before… Dread
and realization built together until he reached the door and saw it:

“You were too weak and too cowardly. You couldn’t defeat Bane.
He broke you like a twig.”

There it stood—“AzBat”—the hulking armored monstrosity Azrael had made of
his mantle. What was going on here? He was watching it unfold
visually and in his memory simultaneously. What was Jean Paul doing?
And where did he get that bastardization of the suit? Bruce had
destroyed that thing long ago…

Bruce was ripped from his thoughts and dove to the floor as the thing
pointed its metallic talon at him and shot a barrage of deadly shuriken.
Bruce rolled for cover behind the sideboard and looked around for some
object to use as a shield. There was a heavy silver tray, if he could
just reach it—

—When he noticed nothing was happening.

The attack had stopped.

He looked again, and nothing stood where AzBat had been. The room
was empty.

Bruce proceeded cautiously into the drawing room.

“Hey, neat trick,” Selina said mildly as he entered. “You just went
that way.”

He’d seen that look on her face before; it was that
‘humor-them-and-handle-them’ look normally reserved for the Iceberg on a
Saturday night.

He looked around.

“I did?” he asked, a hint of Bat-growl creeping into his voice as he
slipped instinctively into Detective-mode, taking in the details for
examination later.

“Other you,” she said. “And Pheromones, flat out crazy as
I’ve ever seen him, screaming about his father and firing those pointy ninja
bat-shurikens at my Turner.” She pointed at a large stormy seascape
with several bat-shaped blades protruding from its canvas and frame.

“As I recall, it was my father he was screaming about,” Bruce
said, examining one of the shuriken embedded in the painting. “And he
was firing them at my head.”

“If I’d ever hit this place when I was working, that’s what I would have
taken. Now look what the idiot did to it.”

“I’ll remember that at Christmas,” Bruce said wryly. “We have other
problems right now.”

“Yeah, I’d say so,” Selina agreed.

Jason reached the door and cleared his throat. “Bruce, I trust you
won’t mind, I took the liberty of encasing Dr. Leiverman in a ßųŁŁą
rħðmbå and moving him to the relative safety of the morning room.
He believes he is watching Selina and I use a Ouija board. I thought
that would be best before he saw something that would be… difficult to
explain.”

“Difficult to explain,” Selina repeated with a sickly smile.
“Jason, you have no idea.”

“I believe I do, seeing as Batman had come into the room oblivious to our
presence, and opened the grandfather clock releasing a hail of poisoned
darts.” Jason lifted his forearm to reveal two of these still sticking
out of his wrist. “Which would be problematic were it not for my
unique physiological condition.”

“Any theories what’s going on here?” Bruce asked testily.

Jason paused thoughtfully, then turned to Selina.

“I suppose the first step in evolving any sort of theory about that is to
ask what it is you saw.”

She pointed around the room as she announced “Batman. Pheromones.
Batty ninja stars in my Turner.”

“Before that,” Bruce cut in. “When you ran out of the study.”

“Oh… that,” she shuddered. “I don’t know what it was. I’d
just taken Jason’s hands, I felt Etrigan, I thought of the last time we did
this, watching Zatanna.”

“That may have been Etrigan’s suggestion,” Jason put in. “You hate
Zatanna, it would be like Etrigan to remind you of that day in order to
awaken thoughts of hate and vengeance which he… well… he finds quite
attractive in a female in ways it would be difficult to describe.”

Selina shrugged, a rooftop shrug that said she didn’t really care if
there were laws against breaking and entering, she was who she was, take it
or leave it.

“Anyway,” she resumed, “I thought of that day watching Zatanna, I glanced
into the water and—” She broke off and made a frustrated vibrating
gesture with both palms along the side of her head. “NO Idea how to
describe it. It was…”

Bruce studied her carefully, trying to lock into her description. “Like
that spark between a match and a matchbook, just before the match-tip
catches fire?”

“I—yeah, something like that…” Selina agreed weakly. “No,” she said
suddenly, “More like ‘Firemen think they put out a fire, but there’s still
something going on inside the walls, buried in the insulation, that nobody
is aware of. They all go home thinking everything is fine, it bursts
into flame overnight, tomorrow we find a big heap of ash where the Chrysler
Building used to be.”

“A spark, smoldering,” Jason repeated.

A loud ear-splitting KREEEEEEE of Black Canary’s Canary Cry erupted
several rooms away, followed by an unearthly crash and angry shouts.

The three of them ran back into the study just in time to see Hawkman
pick up the grandfather clock and bash Batman over the head with it.